Thursday, January 04, 2007

Attaturk mentioned in a previous post that George Will might qualify for today's Wanker Award based on his opinion piece on the unnecessity of a federal minimum wage. Will ends his column with this:

But the minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices. Washington, which has its hands full delivering the mail and defending the shores, should let the market do well what Washington does poorly. But that is a good idea whose time will never come again.

Why not allow the minimum wage be negative? Workers could pay the employers. There is nothing magical about the number zero, once one starts walking down the path Will has chosen.

And an odd path it is. Take this, for example: Will gives us a lot of data about how unimportant the minimum wage is in general, and one of these data is the number of people earning it:

Most of the working poor earn more than the minimum wage, and most of the 0.6 percent (479,000 in 2005) of America's wage workers earning the minimum wage are not poor.